All Done

Started: 2002-07-31 17:18:01

Submitted: 2002-07-31 17:44:58

Visibility: World-readable

Yesterday afternoon at 1400 I stood up in front of a quorum of engineering professors (from whom I've taken at least one class each) and gave an OpenOffice-powered presentation of my senior project, including a neat little demo. (I pinged the embedded 386 board, sitting on the lecturn on which I set my notes that I didn't actually consult, and telnetted to its TCP echo server.) I'm not absolutely convinced that it was compelling, but at least it was good enough.

I returned to my quarters afterwards, applied a few last-minute patches to my paper, printed it out, and handed it to Stirling, and I had officially completed everything I need to do to become a college graduate. (I technically won't graduate until the end of August, when the records department gets around to doing whatever they need to do, mostly mailing me my diploma.)

After turning in the paper, I returned to my quarters and packed furiously. I successfully fit my stuff into Yoda. I borrowed an official dorm vacuum (which sucked abjectly, unfortunately) and managed to clean my floor. The desk worker hunted down an RA and I checked out of my room. I pointed out that one of the outlets (east and south sides of my room; Sittner is privileged enough to have electrical power mounted on the face of the wall, not built in) wasn't grounded and was about ready to fall off the wall.

I departed College Place at 1915 PDT and headed to Longview, arriving shortly after midnight. Today I eventually got around to setting Ziyal up on the local network, where I'm now downloading Debian packages over the obnoxious satellite Internet connection (fast, but it frequently looses connections; I think that's the fault of the Windows 98 box running network address translation; the high latency itself wouldn't be enough to explain the buggyness) and announcing to the world that I am, for all intents and purposes, a college graduate. Works for me.

The official word is that various friendly people will be showing up in the Pacific Northwest starting tomorrow. Should be great fun.